At times Derby would halt abruptly in his revelations, and I wondered whether Asenath could possibly have divined his speech at a distance and cut him off through some unknown sort of telepathic mesmerism--some power of the kind she had displayed at school. Certainly, she suspected that he told me things, for as the weeks passed she tried to stop his visits with words and glances of a most inexplicable potency. Only with difficulty could he get to see me, for although he would pretend to be going somewhere else, some invisible force would generally clog his motions or make him forget his destination for the time being. His visits usually came when Asenath was away--"away in her own body," as he once oddly put it. She always found out later--the servants watched his goings and comings--but evidently she thought it inexpedient to do anything drastic. 4 Derby had been married more than three years on that August day when I got that telegram from Maine. I had not seen him for two months, but had heard he was away "on business". Asenath was supposed to be with him, though watchful gossip declared there was someone upstairs in the house behind the doubly curtained windows. They had watched the purchases made by the servants. And now the town marshal of Chesuncook had wired of the draggled madman who stumbled out of the woods with delirious ravings and screamed to me for protection. It was Edward--and he had been just able to recall his own name and address. Chesuncook is close to the wildest, deepest, and least explored forest belt in Maine, and it took a whole day of feverish jolting through fantastic and forbidding scenery to get there in a car. I found Derby in a cell at the town farm, vacillating between frenzy and apathy. He knew me at once, and began pouring out a meaningless, half-incoherent torrent of words in my direction. "Dan--for God's sake! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps ... the abomination of abominations.... I never would let her take me, and then I found myself there--Iä! Shub-Niggurath!--The shape rose up from the altar, and there were five hundred that howled--the Hooded Thing bleated 'Kamog! Kamog!'--that was old Ephraim's secret name in the coven--I was there, where she promised she wouldn't take me--A minute before I was locked in the library, and then I was there where she had gone with my body--in the place of utter blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black realm begins and the watcher guards the gate--I saw a shoggoth--it changed shape--I can't stand it--I'll kill her if she ever sends me there again--I'll kill that entity--her, him, it--I'll kill it! I'll kill it with my own hands!" [Illustration: "The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps ... the abomination of abominations."]